The Role Of Suffering In Richard Duval's War

After the slaughter of Gerard Duval, Paul’s conscience seemed to have completely drained and the murder has changed him emotionally, but he is later supplied with sympathy. When Paul was ordered to observe furtively upon the position and movement of his belligerent enemy, but Paul departs in trepidation and was suddenly surprised when an unknown being crawls into Paul’s shell hole; as a result, Paul continuously stabs the unknown being. As Paul remains in the shell hole with the soldier, he experiences, “This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger which he stabs [Paul]: Time and time” (221). After Paul had stabbed the French soldier with an actual weapon, a human that Paul should conceive as an “abstraction” suffering, fills
Paul with guilt as time passes, and punctures Paul as if it was an existing dagger. The victim’s “invisible dagger” represents the regret of the inflicted mortality upon an innocent man lying next to Paul and the poignant scene emphasizes the futility of war.
Now that the silence of the dead soldier gradually creeps to Paul, he immediately attempts to apologize for his wrongdoings, “Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours...Forgive me comrade; how could you be my enemy?” (223). Once there was a dead silence, Paul ignores the artificial divisions between each other and Paul’s sympathy for Duval’s suffering is evident when Paul addresses the corpse as “comrade” and the pronouns Paul applies to refer to himself and Duval as “us” and “we”. The similarity between Paul and the Duval is how they both men are obligated to fight each other because the conflicting governments produce propaganda campaigns that have obfuscated many men that their opponents are devils. A moment after Paul’s one-way conversation, he frantically combs through the soldier’s wallet to search for the soldier’s address and notices, “Portraits of a woman and a little girl… Along with them are letters...Most of it I don’t understand, it is so hard to decipher and I scarcely know any French”
(224-5). Remarque’s uses “woman” and “little girl” to reveal how the soldier has a family, a role as a husband and father and evokes sympathy for the family’s loss which leads to the suggestion about the cruelty of war. Although Paul and the Frenchman speak a different language, there is still a connection between each other because they are treasured equally, but the only distinction between each other is the language. A soldier’s act of killing in combat is psychologically traumatic because the soldier carries the responsibility for snatching away another human’s life.